


Deandra Reynolds: Queen of the Spiders

by hotpinkcoffee



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Ableism, Angst, Child Abuse, Eating Disorders, F/M, Gen, Homophobic Language, Internalized Homophobia, Multi, Pre-Canon, Recreational Drug Use, Sexual Abuse, Suicide Attempt, Swearing, Teenagers, Underage Drinking, Underage Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-12-09 05:30:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20989646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotpinkcoffee/pseuds/hotpinkcoffee
Summary: As teenagers, Charlie Kelly learned how to be safe and Dee Reynolds learned how to be cruel. Primarily pre-canon CharDee.





	Deandra Reynolds: Queen of the Spiders

Charlie stops bathing in second grade. His mother tries to coax him into doing it, cries and cajoles, and he acquiesces once a week, but other than that he wears the same clothes every day, starts to smell, starts to get rashes. His teacher complains to his mother, Mac makes an exaggerated “P.U.” sound the next time they have a sleepover, but no one is able to force Charlie to do anything. Once Charlie’s decided the way he is, he doesn’t tend to move. He wonders if he got that stubborn streak from the father he never knew, if maybe there’s a man out there somewhere with a straight nose and green eyes who just can’t be changed. Maybe that’s why Charlie doesn’t have a dad, because the man who made him is out there somewhere and refuses to change from not-dad to dad, and a baby boy and his mother could never do a thing about it.

He imagines the dirt on his body and the grease in his hair like fortress walls, the occasional lice as knights lining up to protect him. He imagines his filthy clothing as a moat around him that no one dare ford. One morning he wakes up and finds a spiderweb around his ear, and he feels, for the first time, blessed. Protected. The way Mac says you’re supposed to feel when you think about angels. He imagines this spider like a dragon hunched over the castle spires blowing fire at anyone who would touch him.

That day in school he draws a dragon with eight legs where he’s supposed to put his times tables.

— 

Nobody sees the Aluminum Monster’s suffering. Not really. Everyone sees the cage and her creaking and galumphing through the hallways and they think that’s it, that’s her life, a normal loser with stringy hair and too much teeth when she smiles who’s been rendered an open wound for them all to stick their fingers into. They don’t see how hard she works just to survive from waking up to going to sleep. They don’t see her holding her piss all day because the bathroom stalls are too narrow for her to get out of her brace to use the toilet; they don’t see the red welts from the metal against her skin; they don’t see her struggling to focus in class through the pain howling up her spine or worse, through the benzos her mother throws at her when she comes home groaning from how much it hurts. They don’t see how it takes her thirty goddamn minutes just to wriggle out of the thing before she goes to bed every night, because either Dennis won’t help her or because she’s too proud to ask him, she can’t remember. They don’t see how by now, she’s a seasoned professional at holding back her tears until she gets home, just like she’s a professional at pretending she can’t hear her mother when her mother says that crying makes her ugly face puffy and fat.

They should be throwing her a fucking parade. They should be congratulating her and telling her what an inspiration she is, for hanging onto each day by her fingernails and crawling through. She should run this fucking school with an iron fist forged in all the bullshit she’s had to go through just to get to class every day, but instead, she’s greeted with jeers. People write in Sharpie on her locker; someone drew a crude picture of her in her brace and wrote “0/10” under it. She hates how much she cries over that one, how two numbers and a line can make her want to die when she’s pushing through everything else.

Her classmates suck all the victory out of her hard-won survival.

— 

The high school schedule cleaves the formerly inseparable Mac and Charlie in two. Mac takes it harder than Charlie does, complaining about how unfair it is every chance he gets and scheduling out Charlie’s life outside of school to make space for him. It’s as if Charlie’s days are coloring books and Mac’s trying to fill every unclaimed space with his own color. Charlie comes to resent it within a week and starts to cancel plans, skips between-class “check-ins”, sometimes even gets detention on purpose just to get a break from the clinging.

But one thing doesn’t budge from the schedule: homework time. Ever since the concept was first introduced to them, they’ve worked on it together in Charlie’s living room, aiming not to excel but just to ride the margin enough not to get held back. Over time Mac’s taken over the entirety of homework duties for the both of them, and while he does a paltry job and needs constant redirection to stay on task, at least he can finish an assignment. Charlie can’t even seem to get through the instructions. Words just seem to drip off the page, or blend together like cheap paints in water. Mac will read something out loud and Charlie can’t seem to place what letters prompted those sounds. 

Sometimes Charlie wonders if it means he’s stupid, but then every time Mac opens his mouth Charlie remembers that twice the homework doesn’t mean twice the smarts.

— 

She and Dennis stopped sleeping in the same bed when she got her back brace. Their dad says that it’s because they’re teenagers now, way too old, and now it’s perverted and deviant, but they both know the real reason: Barbara thinks Dennis is fragile and perfect, while Deandra is diseased and it seems, unfortunately, imperishable. But Dennis still sneaks into her room at night sometimes, crawls under her big fluffy comforter with her, and they lie there together. Sometimes they’re side by side, like they were as kids. Sometimes, now, they hold each other, forehead to forehead.

They both had a plantar’s wart, once. Just one each on their left foot, in exactly the same place. The doctor froze each with some sort of medical dry ice, jabbed them with some localized anesthetic, and pulled the dead warts off with tweezers. The lumps of flesh gave way, leaving red, strangely bloodless holes behind. Dee thinks about the roots on the warts sometimes, how they seemed to cling to the holes and then dangled in the air before the whole thing was sanitarily discarded. If warts had brains, Dee knows how they would feel. 

Sometimes she and Dennis click into their silent twin language, where they each know that their thoughts are not totally their own, that there’s a thought they’re having that’s actually the other’s. She wants that every night, knows that if such synchrony exists it means that all the bullying and disdain in the world couldn’t prove Dennis doesn’t love her. It feels like turning the dial on a staticky radio and hitting the one tenuous point where the music is completely clear. Their bodies ease them out of it as they fall asleep, chaste and close, swapping breath, each cell suddenly remembering that it was divided.

— 

Charlie knows her name is Sarah B. K. and that she’s one of six Sarahs and two Sarah K.’s in his grade, but he doesn’t like to think of her like that. Turning a girl like that into a name seems like trapping a junebug under a glass. He prefers, instead, to think about what she will be someday. He has faith in her, when he watches her study, when he watches her cough on cigarettes and swigs of liquor when she tries to fit in with the cool kids, less a comrade than a shadow licking at the heels of the students bold enough to cut and smoke in study hall. He thinks she could be an astronaut, or a C-E-O, or a veterinarian he can take all the cats he wants to raise to. He imagines her sitting in the center of the galaxy with futures hanging around her like plastic toys from a mobile, and of her plucking the perfect one with her soft fingertips. 

When she turns sixteen she starts working at a restaurant, and he assumes she’s happy with that. After all, she picked “waitress” right out of the sky.

— 

The best thing about being the Aluminum Monster is that when she pukes onstage during the talent show, nobody’s opinion of her gets any lower. She’s already as low as it gets.

— 

The best thing about being Dirtgrub is that no one is surprised or asks what’s wrong when he hides in the janitor’s closet sniffing bleach and licking floor cleaner. They take it as a given and let him brood in his peaceful den unmolested.

— 

Mac’s her friend before he belongs to Dennis. It’s only about two weeks. She’s hiding under the bleachers because the Aluminum Monster taunts were getting to her, smoking a cigarette because it calms her nerves. He skulks on by because he’s waiting for a buyer for his drugs.

“Can I have a cigarette?” He sits on the bleacher above her and kicks his heel against the stair, making a metallic ringing noise right by her head. It doesn’t seem malicious, just annoying. She shrugs and passes one up to him. She smoothes out the skirt of dress and whisks the ash away, as if it matters, as if anyone ever notices what dress she’s wearing or what state it’s in under her brace.

They sit in silence for a bit. He rolls his fingers over the metal bleacher rail, kicks his feet back and forth, fidgets. Whatever buyer he’s waiting for doesn’t show up.

Dee lights her second cigarette. She hears the bell at the school, thinks about the math class she’s missing. Her grades are fine; they’re better than Dennis’, which is the only standard that matters to her. “Slow day?”

“Dude.” Mac heaves a sigh. “You have no idea. Ever since my acid supply dried up I’ve got to bust ass to get people to buy anything. I’m stuck with just the stuff I find around the house, you know, my dad’s stashes, and most of them are these weird pills. I’ve been trying to sell them as a mystery bag, like, an adventure, never know what you’re going to get kind of thing, but no one’s biting.”

“Well, that’s your first problem. No one’s going to try mystery drugs. Just say they’re ecstasy.” She thinks it’s some kind of miracle that the guy hasn’t been caught yet, given that he’s known her for all of thirty seconds before advertising that he’s selling drugs, but maybe people go easy on you when you telegraph that you’re a fucking dumbass.

“All kinds of people will try mystery drugs.”

“Okay, well, have fun with your zero customers, limpdick.” She rolls her eyes and picks at the grass. The air is heavy and hot. She feels sweat roll down between her shoulder blades, glances up at him and sees his bangs hanging lank and greasy.

“I’m Mac,” he says. Like he’s trying to get that name in her head before she fastens his school nickname to him.

“I know who you are, Ronnie the Rat. For a drug dealer you’re really not under the radar.”

“You’re the Aluminum Monster.” He says that like he’s parrying her. She can have her real name, but only if she lets him name himself. She has to play along.

She does. She’s as eager to shed her name as she is to shed the brace itself. “My name is Deandra. Mac.”

“Dee.”

She nods and takes a drag. “Dee.” 

—

Then it’s Dennis and Mac and Charlie and there’s _three_ of them, like a hydra of teenage boyhood, building their imaginary treehouses to exclude her. 

— 

The first time Charlie steps into Dennis’ house he’s entirely convinced that he walked through a portal into a palace. He passes by a little bowl of polished rocks and tries to eat one, mistaking them for candy. He hears his own tooth crack.

“Dude, don’t embarrass me,” Mac hisses. Mac’s as dressed up as Mac gets, which is limited by Mac’s observational skills rather than by a lack of effort, and is still more than enough to make Charlie look shabby. Mac wore a tie over a clean short-sleeve shirt and swapped his sneakers out for shoes that must belong to his dad, at least two inches too big. Charlie’s in his same tattered horse t-shirt and a jacket that smells vaguely of gasoline and urine.

Charlie wants to wriggle out of the fist-grip of this house. He feels exposed, like some evil force can see him through the huge windows, like all the decorative things are creeping in towards him, like the beautiful view is not one he can look leisurely at but instead walled off by glass, taunting him with its unattainability. He doesn’t belong here; he’s a creature of darkness and grime, comfortable in his domain. He has a kingdom in back alleys, broom closets, drainage pipes, under bridges. Here he has nothing but the too-bright glare of a skylight pummeling him into the floor.

He pockets some of the polished rocks. Maybe they just need to be microwaved.

— 

Charlie isn’t surprised when Mac starts insisting that they spend all their time at the Reynolds’ mansion. He knows that the Reynolds’ home is the closest brush Mac’s ever had to wealth, stability, a family unit with a mom and a dad, that as far as Mac’s concerned the Reynolds are the picture of a perfect life. He knows Mac likes men, too, and that Mac doesn’t know karate, and that Mac’s ashamed that his mom has him steal from the church pantry, and that there are some parts of Mac that are more scared that his dad will come home from prison than excited. He’d consider it an accomplishment to know his best friend so much better than his best friend knows himself, except Charlie thinks that he probably hasn’t met a single person in the whole world who knows himself less than Mac does.

He also realizes, sooner than everyone else, maybe sooner than some people realize ever, that poverty makes people sad but money doesn’t make them happy. He can smell the lovelessness in the Reynolds’ mansion, a place that still makes him want to run away from himself any time he’s in it. He sees how Dennis and Dee sustain eye contact at lunch, like they’re competing to see who can eat less. He sees how the two of them overdo it when he and Mac bring over hard alcohol.

“Do you think they drink that much because they’re like, sad?” Charlie asks one time, when he and Mac are laying on the carpet in the Reynolds’ basement, watching the rise and fall of the unconscious twins’ chests instead of the action movie playing in the background. There’s the lingering smell of vomit from where Dennis upchucked into a fancy vase across the room. Mac throws a ball of paper at Dee’s forehead; it bounces off without any reaction from her. Charlie thinks about how small Dee looks without the back brace; he knows she’s tall for a girl, way taller than he is, but he’s used to seeing her lumbering around like an entire jungle gym. It somehow never occurred to her that she had feet, either; now he sees that she not only has feet, big feet, but toes painted strawberry pink with dainty flower stickers on them.

“No, dude. They just haven’t been drinking as long as we have.” Mac has that vaguely concerned expression that says he’s willing himself into believing something, that in a few moments it’ll become facts to him. “Besides, why would they be sad? They have everything. They even have us for friends, and we kick ass.”

— 

She and Mac trade V-cards. She isn’t attracted to him, but that doesn’t matter. It’s not about attraction, it’s about feeling for five minutes like she’s worth fucking. Not pretty, not even desirable, just something that isn’t a discarded tin can in a dress. And Mac’s desperate, she can read it all over him. He’s so left behind by his peers, as he disintegrates into the role of the last virgin while everyone else, even Charlie, notches up their bedposts. They have sweaty, fumbling sex at a house party in a stranger’s bedroom. He opens up her back brace gently, so much more gently than she thought he could be, but it still feels like he’s pulling apart her rib cage to reveal a pulpy, busted heart. She feels vulnerable, there on her back as he thrusts into her, already soft.

So when he’s just as vulnerable, afterwards, sheepishly slipping his underwear back on after they wordlessly realized that this wasn’t going anywhere, she laughs at him and says “Jesus Christ, Mac, that sucked. Did you learn to be such a faggot from your dad and his prison sex?”

She doesn’t know why she says it, she just knows that it makes her _happy_ to see him jerk back like she’s just slapped him, his pants around his knees. She wants to drink the tears that well up at the corner of his eyes. She thinks that this might be the first time anyone’s called him a faggot to his face instead of behind his back, and she hopes that’s true, because she wants to be person to inaugurate him into this new identity, to cast him in a role as low and mockable as hers. She wants to be the first one to sink that knife in.

“Jesus, Dee. You ugly fucking bitch,” he says. Spits.

“Whatever, dick.” Her mother calls her worse every day.

— 

No one comes to their sweet sixteen except Mac and Charlie, who, treacherous degenerates that they are, run off to play in the topiary maze behind the mansion the first chance they get. Dee suspects that those two morons will be stuck in there for weeks, and she thinks about how she wouldn’t feel particularly sorry for them if they starved to death out there surrounded by animal-shaped bushes and shitty fountains.

Dee gets pissed off by the emptiness of the party, but she’s mostly riding Dennis’ fury, letting him goad her into deeper and deeper darkness. She’s plugging up her hurt with anger, but he’s fully raging, screaming into pillows, breaking things, and she’s just trying to keep up. When they were little kids he’d throw tantrums and she’d hold her breath. That pattern hasn’t changed.

“Idiots, subhuman idiots!” he shrieks, shoving over the table in the living room, fully aware that the housekeeper will right everything in a few hours and probably angrier for the impermanence of his wrath. Mascara is running down his face. “I invited all of them, they should have been grateful that we invited them to a mansion. They’re all poor white trash savages who should be kissing our feet, not skipping the best party of their lives to go sit in a ditch or whatever they’re doing. There should be a line outside the door. This mansion is a temple for gods and they’re, they’re ants! They’re insects!”

Since he’s smashing things, Dee joins in, grabbing a vase and throwing it into the wall hard enough that the shrapnel skitters all the way across the room. “God damn it!” She had a whole routine planned. She has a new dress that cost more than a car thanks to needling their dad, and she had a stand up routine, she had her brace off, she and Dennis had picked the music diligently, and they’d pilfered all the most expensive liquor from their parents’ stash alongside all the coke in an operation that had taken them months, and they were going to have had an amazing party that vindicated them in the eyes of the school. Social redemption had been so close she could taste it, and now it’s replaced by something acidic. She tears down a curtain. She slugs from a bottle of vodka. “I’m getting the fucking matches.”

“Fuck this piece of shit mansion,” Dennis says, before inarticulately howling.

“Fuck this piece of shit life!” Dee screams in response. She doesn’t even know if she means it or if it just feels so good to match rage and hurt with rage and hurt, she and her brother building each other up until it’s a competition as much as it is a mutual campaign.

“They’ll be sorry,” Dennis is still ranting as Dee returns from the kitchen with a lighter and vegetable oil, but he’s quieter now. She dumps the oil onto the floor, soaking the carpet, watching him curiously while he gets bottle after bottle from the liquor cabinet and sets it on the glass coffee table in the middle of the room. He tosses the gift they got from Mac - a ribboned paper baggie of mystery drugs because of course Mac would get them drugs for their birthday - onto the table. “They’ll be sorry. No one at the school will be able to talk about anything else if we take ourselves out. It’ll be their fault.”

Dee stops. The last drops of oil leave the bottle and the lighter sits heavy in her hand. “‘We’?”

He gives her that look like she’s an idiot, and she realizes she is, because of course it’s “we”. She puts the lighter on the table. She’s never felt lonelier in the world than right now, at this party no one came to, with no one but her mirror image going down with her. He takes the bottle of drugs and pours some onto the table. He takes a swig of vodka and he meets her eyes, and she feels as if there’s only one person in the room, and she isn’t sure if it’s her or him.

“Are we doing this?”

“I don’t know, sis. Are we?”

She sustains his gaze. When she got her brace, she stopped being able to compete with Dennis. She used to be able to run faster, climb higher. She could do a cartwheel a full year before he could, she could spin in twice as many circles as he could without getting dizzy. But she got her brace and her activities were limited to ones she could do without having to move much. Staring contests. Dennis always blinks first.

She’s looking at him when she shoves a palmful of pills into her mouth and washes them down. It’s right that he’s the last person she’ll see.

Dennis’ face turns ashen. “Jesus Christ, Dee, I wasn’t serious! Go make yourself throw up!”

She does. She’s pretty good at that by now.

— 

“Oh, there you are.”

Dee’s lying on the ground at the edge of the football field when Charlie approaches. She came without her brace and she hurts less when she’s on her back, and now she’s staring at the stars. She can dimly hear the school dance in the distance, the one she ran from when a girl from biology threw Dr. Pepper on her, laughing, some toadie for the cool kids seeking approval by pushing around one of their designated targets. She feels stupid. Some part of her truly believed that this time would be different, that it was the brace that was drawing all the mockery and not her. But now her chest and her new dress are sticky with drying soda and the stars look like bulletholes, because it’s her. It’s always just been her, from the day she was born. Her mother was right: some people are just born worthless.

“What do you want, Charlie?” She doesn’t push herself up. She just rests her hands on her abdomen, letting him have room in the plushest part of the grass to sit next to her if he wants it. He takes her up on the offer. She can’t place what he smells like, but she knows whatever it is it’s ruining that rented tux his mess of a mother probably agonized over tailoring, the tux Mac probably fussed over for a good half hour before they got here to the dance. She wrinkles her nose, but she figures that’s probably so many people’s reaction to Charlie’s presence that he thinks that’s just how normal people greet each other.

“I brought you something.” He pulls out a box from his pocket, one of the flat ones that earrings go into. The pink ribbon still has creases from the plastic drugstore packaging it must have come in. She raises her eyebrows and sits up as fantasies explode behind her eyes, the irrepressible monster of _hope_ emerging back from the swamp, jewelry and princess cakes swirling up from the dark. She always forgets how hungry she is just for a taste of that life, how all it takes is one flicker of possibility for her to feel her heart race with bone-deep longing. How even Charlie would be enough if he could make her feel like a piece of treasure for just a minute. She reaches for the box and he yanks it away, smiling.

“Charlie! Give it!” She lurches to grab it, and this time he gives it up. She pulls the box to her chest and undoes the ribbon, taking a pause before she opens it to try and lower her expectations. Her brain says it’s a pretty rock or some useless piece of trash Charlie’s trying to pass off as generous. Her heart says it’s diamond earrings.

It’s spiders. A box of hairy long-legged house spiders that wake and unsuccessfully try to escape before she slams the top back down.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she casts the box on the ground and leaps to her feet. It stays shut, which she supposes is a blessing, because if spiders started running all over the place she would flip out and punch him.

The spiders are probably eating each other in there. She stamps on them, and then Charlie gets up and shoves her aside, hard enough he nearly knocks her over, to protect the precious, precious fucking spiders. She shoves him back. He does fall down.

“Stop, Dee! They’re there to protect you!” He clutches the box, looking _offended_ and then baffled as she starts to cry. She’s never cried in front of him before. She kicks the ground and howls with anger and wipes her cheeks with her palms as it all comes down inside her, the weight of the cruelty of the joke caving her in. She buries her face in her hands and sobs. She rips up grass with her fists and it feels like the only thing that makes it better, just destroying something as she chokes on her spit and tears. She hears Charlie, dimly, “Dee, what are you doing, this was a present to keep you safe!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Dee, I got the spiders to protect you.” Charlie stays on the ground. Dee thinks, if this were Dennis, if this were Mac, they’d be afraid of her right now. They’d recoil at the thought that she was very likely to leap on them and tear their hair out, gouge out their eyes. Charlie seems oblivious to that possibility. “I thought if the spiders wrapped their webs around you, you wouldn’t get those cuts from your brace.”

“Huh?” It’s a many-layered huh. An incredulous huh, a surprised huh, a confused huh, a relieved huh. She doesn’t know how to hold onto this bizarre new information. She can’t follow Charlie’s thought process, can’t tell if he’s joking or stupid or just rattling off gibberish because he huffed too much turpentine today. And he looks at her with similar consternation, like he simply can’t fathom why his gift was received so poorly.

She keeps crying. He keeps watching, unafraid, annoyed.

“That’s not how spiders work, Charlie.” She wipes her nose on the hem of her dress, still sobbing. 

“Uh, Dee, I know a lot about spiders. Spider silk is five times as strong as steel. You just need to layer a lot of it on.” He shakes his head at her like she’s a complete idiot. “Besides, spiders are awesome.”

She finds some steel left in her after the sniffling. She takes a deep breath. “Are you saying you want to put spiders all over me? Because that’s not happening.”

“Okay, fine. Just say no to my present.” Charlie throws a hand up, but he doesn’t seem that mad. “I’ll go put them back where I found them.”

He starts to walk away. She watches. The wind kisses her tears and snot and sweat. The stars punch on down. Her back aches.

She calls out to him, “Charlie. Charlie, wait.”

He stops. She’s looking at the school. She doesn’t say thank you. What she does say is:

“Let’s hold onto them. I’m going to put them in some bitch’s hair.”


End file.
